One of the main uses for dachshunds is as earth dogs, but that function is hardly their only talent.

They are quite adept at doing the work of a hound. They can run rabbits and raccoons, tree squirrels, and track wounded game.

They can also work quite nicely as a retriever or spaniel, although they are not quite as adept at swimming as retrievers are.

But how could such an animal have been developed out of scent hounds?

Aren’t scent hounds hard to train?

Aren’t they also incredibly docile, while dachshunds are known to be scrappy?

I think some of the resistance to counting dachshunds as hounds comes from our own prejudices from the Anglo-Saxon hound tradition.

The Anglo-Saxon tradition of hounds has been mostly been of large packs of dogs that run a great distance while on the trail. The British are known for their mounted fox hunts, but they have a tradition of hunting deer in much the same way.

The British could get away with this, because the hunting culture was based upon a hunting-estate model. From the eighteenth century onward, there were vast deer parks throughout England, where nobles would ride to hounds.

The selection for a British hound was one that had a good nose and good stamina.

There was no selection for biddability, other than the dogs were required to have some road manners.

The German hunting culture– and much of that on the European continent– was quite different.

The region that became Germany was always crowded. There was always very little room to have agricultural enterprises and hunting estates.

And although hunting was initially a right given to nobles, it eventually became a popular activity– much more so than it was in the United Kingdom. The failed revolutions of 1848 had led to some concessions from the nobility in many of the German-speaking states, and one of these concessions was a right to hunt in the forests.

The working and middle classes of Germany wanted dogs that could do it all. All the German hunting dogs are capable of doing multiple things. After all, space and food were limited, and the various governments taxed dogs very highly. A German who wanted to hunt needed a dog with many talents, while his English noble counterpart could afford to have spaniels, retrievers, deer greyhounds, greyhounds that coursed only hares and rabbits, pointers and setters than never retrieved, and any number of little fox, badger, and otter bolting terriers.

The German hunter needed a dog that could be used to hunt a variety of game, and he needed one that didn’t consume that much in terms of resources.

When it came to hounds, the Germans had several strains of bloodhound or lymer that were used to track wounded game. These dogs are called schweisshunds, and there was also pack hounds called bracken (singlar “bracke”). There is also an Austrian black and tan hound (Brandlbracke) and the Tyrolean Hound.

All of these dogs are fairly large, and almost all of them were used as lymers, hounds that were used to track game on the leash. This means that the were often selecting dogs for greater biddability than the Anglo-Saxon hounds were.

They were also used to bay up wild boar, which means that these dogs have to have a sharper edge than a foxhound.

Very few dogs are as friendly as a well-bred beagle or foxhound, which is exactly what you’d expect from dogs that were selected to run in big packs.

Basset-type dogs were always very common France, and it appears that some of these bassets were incorporated in the German hound stock. Some of the French bassets are more like a dachshund in temperament and function. The fawn Brittany basset is not often run in packs, and it was meant to be a working man’s little hound.

France developed a kind of hybrid system of hound culture from the Germans and British. The French did keep large packs of hounds to hunt everything on big hunting estates, but after their experiences with the Revolutions of 1848, the commoners were given access to the hunt. And they began to produce multipurpose dogs.

The influx of basset genes into the German hound population apparently gave someone an idea. As early as the eighteenth century, hunters were using small bassets to bolt badgers from badger setts. It was not likely a common practice, but by the time German hunting became more democratic, there was a stronger emphasis to produce a smaller hunting hound.

My guess is the Germans used this smaller bassetized German hound framework to produce the dachshund. These bassetized German hounds would have the sharper temperament and greater biddability of a German hound, but they would have short legs.

One might think these dogs are the dachsbracke hounds, but there is some debate as to whether the two breeds of dachsbracke (the Alpine and the Westphalian, the ancestor of the Swedish drever) are the result of crossing dachshunds with larger hounds or whether they are the bassetized German hound that is the “missing link” between the larger German hounds and the dachshunds.

They could be either. Dachsbracke is sometime treated as a portmanteau between the words “dackel or dachshund” and the German word for hound, but the name actually means “badger hound,” which might suggest that these dogs actually are the bassetized German hounds that are the missing link between the larger hounds and the improved dachshund. (Dachshund means “badger dog,” not badger hound. They are known by this name only in English. Germans call them teckel or dackel.)

If this is true, then dachshunds are an improvement on the dachsbracke. From that type of dog, they bred them to be even smaller and more adept at doing earth dog work, even getting them small enough to hunt rabbits in their warrens.

They may have done so through the influx of pinscher blood. Pinscher were much more common among the middle classes of Germany. They initially served the function of the feist in the United States and the larger terriers in Ireland. They were small, multi-purpose working dogs. The smaller sizes became popular pets of the nobility and then with the growing middle class in the German-speaking lands.

It’s very likely that breeding the small pinschers into these dogs resulted in the very thin coat of the smooth dachshund, which they then tried to fix by breeding some strains with wire-haired dogs– perhaps Dandie Dinmont terriers, perhaps affenpinschers, griffon-coated hounds, or (more likely) small schnauzers– and poodles were also probably in the mix as well. Poodles could introduce biddability, retrieving instinct, and when crossed with single-coated smooth dog, the possibility of producing a wire-haired dog.

Others crossed the dogs with some sort of spaniel or other feathered gun dog to produced long-haired dachshunds. This also would create dachshund that would be very good at hunting feathered game.

I think the case is pretty good that the dachshund is a hound, but to understand why it’s a hound, one must understand the other hounds of Germany and that nation’s hunting culture. It is also worth understanding that, like all German hunting dogs, dachshunds were meant to be used for a variety of purposes. To reach this end, they added blood from other breeds, but the dogs still remained hounds in terms of the bulk of their genetic material.

A dachshund is a hound that can work as a terrier, but I don’t think it is correct to call them terriers. Even the smaller-sized, more terrier-like dogs are capable of blood-tracking with a greater utility than, say, a Jack Russell terrier.

The dachshund might be a good example of convergent evolution through artificial selection. It is a hound that incidentally developed some adaptations associated with terriers.

When I called my neighbors four miniature Doxies terriors was referring to thier scrappy temperaments. I knew several folks years ago that had Doxies as a family pet. The temperament was quite different in current encountes today.
The Doxie lost its popular status of course from those disc problems much like the collie. It has been my observation every breed that reaches the top ten ends with health issues due to sloppy breeding for the dollars.

Pai “some” show people are definitely going the wrong direction for the dachshund. I know the breeder you pictured. He has money and is doing things wrong i agree. Please do not put show breeders in the category of ruining. We try hard to raise functional dachshunds and so do alot of other show people I know. I think the dog pictured is very ugly and incorrect. The judges need to take the blame as well cause they do not know what to look for so they will just pic the famous handlers. It’s a very politcal sport.

We were probably unlucky with our smooth standard dachshund; she refused to walk on the lead, barked a lot and bit our young son’s toes when he delayed going to bed. She was our first family dog and our daughter loved her, “warts and all”. She reared two litters and eventually died at quite a good age. She did not have exaggerated length and never suffered from back problems. Unfortunately, one of her daughters whom we kept, did suffer badly from back problems and sadly had to be put down. We never had another dachshund after that. However the people in the property next to ours today have a miniature wirehaired dachsund anyone would love to be owned by. Okay he’s noisy and hyperactive but a great friendly little character and – best of all – that dog loves us all on this side of the fence almost as much as he loves his own people.

It’s nice to see some respect for the dachshund – too easy to write them off as crippled curiosities instead of real working dogs. Love the picture, too!

There are several multipurpose dogs that don’t fit neatly into the modern breed group categories – especially among the sporting dogs. I’m glad that the AKC is allowing more cross purpose dogs to compete, at least at the Test level. I remember reading an article in a UK dog magazine years ago about FCI trials, which apparently have water trials for Teckels.

I don’t think that the willingness to go to ground is necessarily an indication that a dog is closely related to terriers. Many dogs will go to ground after prey, although of course some are more proficient than others. We don’t have badgers here, but I’ve seen foxhounds, coonhounds, huskies, shepherds, elkhounds and all sorts of mixed breeds dig all day after groundhogs. Not that they usually catch them: by the time the dogs has dug a hole big enough to fit itself, the groundhog is usually long gone out the other end of its burrow. But the instinct and willingness is there.

Coonhounds often have to be broken of trying to dig raccoons out of dens. A dog actually stands a much better chance of digging a raccoon out of groundhog den than climbing up a tree and catching it, so a lot of hounds will try to push the raccoons into dens.

This is not what is wanted in a coonhound. Coonhounds are supposed to tree.

True enough, and I do love to hear coonhounds on a tree. But they will dig, too. My dad always kept at least a couple of coonhounds (until he was no longer physically able to keep up with them). He used to say that the problem with allowing the hounds to bay the coon in the ground was that you didn’t know whether they’d actually bayed a raccoon, or a groundhog or other “trash” (“trash” meaning anything other than a coon). And a dog that did manage to grab a coon on the ground could be seriously injured. Plus, much of the excitement and satisfaction of the hunt was hearing and then seeing the hounds on a tree. (Dad and his hunting buddies didn’t kill the coons; they just chased & treed them for sport.)

Siberian huskies are often inveterate diggers, too. They’ll dig huge holes trying to get at (for instance) a rat. There again, though, the problem with actually utilizing that digging enthusiasm is the size and build of the dog; it just can’t go to ground efficiently like a doxie or a low-lined terrier can.